Every so often, a scientific report will come out that warns of the life-shortening dangers of smoking, eating red meat, sitting too long, or of drinking too much alcohol. But until now, no researchers have tried to quantify the day-to-day hazards of bad habits.
British statistician David Spiegelhalter, in a report published Monday in British Medical Journal, attempts to quantify which habits have a greater impact on life expectancy: Is drinking heavily worse than living a sedentary lifestyle?
To do this, he created a unit of measure called a "microlife," which corresponds to 30 minutes of life expectancy. Using other studies, he determined that for each day of heavy smoking, a person could be shaving about five hours off his life; someone who watches TV for two hours a day loses about 30 minutes for each day they take part in that activity.
"I'm taking lifelong habits and looking at how they affect people on average, convert it to a daily rate," Spiegelhalter says. "The whole idea is to make a comparison about healthy activities and bad activities. Crudely, drinking two cups of coffee will cancel out eating a burger."
Spiegelhalter says when people hear about life expectancy studies, they assume they'll lose a couple years off the end of their lives. Instead, he says, they should consider it as "aging faster" — a smoker could be hurtling faster towards lung cancer, for instance, than a nonsmoker.
"If you're a smoker, it's like you're moving at your death as if you were living 29 hours a day, it's accelerated aging," he says. "It's a bit of a metaphor — you're getting older quicker rather than living just a bit less."
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